Collected Fictions (36 page)

I pass now to hypotheses. The simplest, but also the least satisfactory, posits two Damiáns—the coward who died in Entre Ríosin 1946, and the brave man who died at Masoller in 1904. The problem with that hypothesis is that it doesn't explain the truly enigmatic part of it all: the curious comings and goings of Col. Tabares' memory, the forgetfulness that wipes out the image and even the name of the man that was remembered such a short time ago. (I do not, cannot, accept the even simpler hypothesis—that I might have dreamed the first remembering.) More curious yet is the
supernatural
explanation offered by Ulrike von Kühlmann. Pedro Damián, Ulrike suggests, died in the battle, and at the hour of his death prayed to God to return him to Entre Ríos. God hesitated a second before granting that favor, and the man who had asked it was already dead, and some men had seen him killed. God, who cannot change the past, although He can change the images of the past, changed the image of death into one of unconsciousness, and the shade of the man from Entre Ríos returned to his native land. Returned, but we should recall that he was a shade, a ghost. He lived in solitude, without wife, without friends; he loved everything, possessed everything, but from a distance, as though from the other side of a pane of glass; he "died," but his gossamer image endured, like water within water. That hypothesis is not correct, but it ought to have suggested the true one (the one that today I
believe
to be the true one), which is both simpler and more outrageous. I discovered it almost magically in Pier Damiani's treatise titled
De
omnipotentia,
which I sought out because of two lines from Canto XXI of the
Paradiso
— two lines that deal with a problem of identity. In the fifth chapter of his treatise, Pier Damiani maintains, against Aristotle and Fredegarius of Tours, that God can make what once existed never to have been. I read those old theological arguments and began to understand the tragic story of don Pedro Damián. This is the way I imagine it:

Damián behaved like a coward on the field of Masoller, and he dedicated his life to correcting that shameful moment of weakness. He returned to Entre Ríos;he raised his hand against no man, he "marked" no one,* he sought no reputation for bravery, but in the fields of Ñancay, dealing with the brushy wilderness and the skittish livestock, he hardened himself. Little by little he was preparing himself, unwittingly, for the miracle. Deep inside himself, he thought: If fate brings me another battle, I will know how to deserve it. For forty years he awaited that battle with vague hopefulness, and fate at last brought it to him, at the hour of his death. It brought it in the form of a delirium, but long ago the Greeks knew that we are the shadows of a dream. In his dying agony, he relived his battle, and he acquitted himself like a man — he led the final charge and took a bullet in the chest. Thus, in 1946, by the grace of his long-held passion, Pedro Damián died in the defeat at Masoller, which took place between the winter and spring of the year 1904. The
Summa Theologica
denies that God can undo, unmake what once existed, but it says nothing about the tangled concatenation of causes and effects — which is so vast and so secret that it is possible that not a
single
remote event can be annulled, no matter how insignificant, without canceling the present. To change the past is not to change a mere single event; it is to annul all its consequences, which tend to infinity. In other words: it is to create two histories of the world. In what we might call the first, Pedro Damián died in Entre Ríos in 1946; in the second, he died at Masoller in 1904. This latter history is the one we are living in now, but the suppression of the former one was not immediate, and it produced the inconsistencies I have reported. In Col. Dionisio Tabares we can see the various stages of this process: at first he remembered that Damián behaved like a coward; then he totally forgot him; then he recalled his impetuous death. The case of the storekeeper Abaroa is no less instructive; he died, in my view, because he had too many memories of don Pedro Damián.

As for myself, I don't think I run a similar risk. I have guessed at and recorded a process inaccessible to humankind, a sort of outrage to rationality; but there are circumstances that mitigate that awesome privilege. For the moment, I am not certain that I have always written the truth. I suspect that within my tale there are false recollections. I suspect that Pedro Damián (if he ever existed) was not called Pedro Damián, and that I remember him under that name in order to be able to believe, someday in the future, that his story was suggested to me by the arguments of Pier Damiani. Much the same thing occurs with that poem that I mentioned in the first paragraph, the poem whose subject is the irrevocability of the past. In 1951 or thereabouts I will recall having concocted a tale of fantasy, but I will have told the story of a true event in much the way that naive Virgil, two thousand years ago, thought he was heralding the birth of a man though he had foretold the birth of God.

Poor Damián!Death carried him off at twenty in a war he knew nothing of and in a homemade sort of battle—yet though it took him a very long time to do so, he did at last achieve his heart's desire, and there is perhaps no greater happiness than that.

My name is Otto Dietrichzur Linde. One of my forebears, Christoph zur Linde, died in the cavalry charge that decided the victory of Zorndorf. During the last days of 1870, my maternal great-grandfather, Ulrich Forkel, was killed in the Marchenoir forest by French sharpshooters; Captain Dietrichzur Linde, my father, distinguished himself in 1914 at the siege of Namur, and again two years later in the crossing of the Danube.
[1]

As for myself, I am to be shot as a torturer and a murderer. The court has acted rightly; from the first, I have confessed my guilt. Tomorrow, by the time the prison clock strikes nine, I shall have entered the realms of death; it is natural that I should think of my elders, since I am come so near their shadow—since, somehow, I am they.

During the trial (which fortunately was short) I did not speak; to explain myself at that point would have put obstacles in the way of the verdict and made me appear cowardly. Now things have changed; on this night that precedes my execution, I can speak without fear. I have no desire to be pardoned, for I feel no guilt, but I do wish to be understood. Those who heed my words shall understand the history of Germany and the future history of the world. I know that cases such as mine, exceptional and shocking now, will very soon be unremarkable. Tomorrow I shall die, but I am a symbol of the generations to come.

I was born in Marienburg in1908. Two passions, music and metaphysics, now almost forgotten, allowed me to face many terrible years with bravery and even happiness. I cannot list all my benefactors, but there are two names I cannot allow myself to omit: Brahms and Schopenhauer. Frequently, I also repaired to poetry; to those two names, then, I would add another colossal Germanic name: William Shakespeare. Early on, theology had held some interest for me, but I was forever turned from that fantastic discipline (and from Christianity) by Schopenhauer with his direct arguments and Shakespeare and Brahms with the infinite variety of their worlds. I wish anyone who is held in awe and wonder, quivering with tenderness and gratitude, transfixed by some passage in the work of these blessed men—anyone so touched—to know that I too was once transfixed like them—I the abominable.

Nietzsche and Spengler entered my life in 1927. A certain eighteenth-century author observes that no man wants to owe anything to his contemporaries; in order to free myself from an influence that I sensed to be oppressive, I wrote an article titled
"Abrechnung mit Spengler,"
wherein I pointed out that the most unequivocal monument to those characteristics that the author called Faustian was
not
Goethe's miscellaneous drama
[2]
but rather a poem written twenty centuries ago, the
De rerumnatures*
I did, however, give just due to the sincerity of our philosopher of history, his radically German
(kerndeutsch)
and military spirit. In 1929 I joined the party.

I shall say little about my years of apprenticeship. They were harder for me than for many others, for in spite of the fact that I did not lack valor, I felt no calling for violence. I did, however, realize that we were on the threshold of a new age, and that that new age, like the first years of Islam or Christianity, demanded new men. As individuals, my comrades were odious to me; I strove in vain to convince myself that for the high cause that had brought us all together, we were not individuals.

Theologians claim that if the Lord's attention were to stray for even one second from my right hand, which is now writing, that hand would be plunged into nothingness, as though it had been annihilated by a lightless fire. No one can exist, say I, no one can sip a glass of water or cut off a piece of bread, without justification. That justification is different for every man; I awaited the inexorable war that would test our faith. It was enough for me to know that I would be a soldier in its battles. I once feared that we would be disappointed by the cowardice of England and Russia. Chance (or destiny) wove a different future for me—on March 1, 1939, at nightfall, there were riots in Tilsit, which the newspapers did not report; in the street behind the synagogue, two bullets pierced my leg, and it had to be amputated.
[3]

Days later, our armies entered Bohemia; when the sirens announced the news, I was in that sedentary hospital, trying to lose myself, forget myself, in the books of Schopenhauer. On the windowsill slept a massive, obese cat—the symbol of my vain destiny.

In the first volume of
Parergaund Paralipomena,
I read once more that all things that can occur to a man, from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death, have been predetermined by him. Thus, all inadvertence is deliberate, every casual encounter is an engagement made beforehand, every humiliation is an act of penitence, every failure a mysterious victory, every death a suicide. There is no more cunning consolation than the thought that we have chosen our own misfortunes; that individual theology reveals a secret order, and in a marvelous way confuses ourselves with the deity. What unknown purpose (I thought) had made me seek out that evening, those bullets, this mutilation? Not the fear of war—I knew that; something deeper. At last I believed I understood. To die for a religion is simpler than living that religion fully; battling savage beasts in Ephesus is less difficult (thousands of obscure martyrs did it) than being Paul, the servant of Jesus Christ; a single act is quicker than all the hours of a man. The battle and the glory are
easy;
Raskolnikov's undertaking was more difficult than Napoleon's. On February 7, 1941, I was made subdirector of the Tarnowitz concentration camp.

Carrying out the duties attendant on that position was not something I enjoyed, but I never sinned by omission. The coward proves himself among swords; the merciful man, the compassionate man, seeks to be tested by jails and others' pain. Nazism is intrinsically a
moral
act, a stripping away of the old man, which is corrupt and depraved, in order to put on the new. In battle, amid the captains' outcries and the shouting, such a transformation is common; it is not common in a crude dungeon, where insidious compassion tempts us with ancient acts of tenderness. I do not write that word "compassion" lightly: compassion on the part of the superior man is Zarathustra's ultimate sin. I myself (I confess) almost committed it when the famous poet David Jerusalem was sent to us from Breslau.

Jerusalem was a man of fifty; poor in the things of this world, persecuted, denied, calumniated, he had consecrated his genius to hymns of happiness. I think I recall that in the
Dichtung der Zeit,
Albert Sörgel compared him to Whitman. It is not a happy comparison: Whitman celebrates the universe
a
priori,
in a way that is general and virtually indifferent; Jerusalem takes delight in every smallest thing, with meticulous and painstaking love. He never stoops to enumerations, catalogs. I can still recite many hexameters from that profound poem titled "Tse Yang, Painter of Tigers," which is virtually striped with tigers, piled high with transversal, silent tigers, riddled through and through with tigers. Nor shall I ever forget the soliloquy"Rosenkranz Talks with the Angel," in which a sixteenth-century London moneylender tries in vain, as he is dying, to exculpate himself, never suspecting that the secret justification for his life is that he has inspired one of his clients (who has seen him only once, and has no memory even of that) to create the character Shylock. A man of memorable eyes, sallow skin, and a beard that was almost black, David Jerusalem was the prototypical Sephardic Jew, although he belonged to the depraved and hated Ashkenazim. I was severe with him; I let neither compassion nor his fame make me soft. I had realized many years before I met David Jerusalem that everything in the world can be the seed of a possible hell; a face, a word, a compass, an advertisement for cigarettes—anything can drive a person insane if that person cannot manage to put it out of his mind. Wouldn't a man be mad if he constantly had before his mind's eye the map of Hungary? I decided to apply this principle to the disciplinary regimen of our house, and...
[4]
In late 1942, Jerusalem went insane; on March 1, 1943, he succeeded in killing himself.
[5]

I do not know whether Jerusalem understood that if I destroyed him, it was in order to destroy my own compassion. In my eyes, he was not a man, not even a Jew; he had become a symbol of a detested region of my soul. I suffered with him, I died with him, I somehow have been lost with him; that was why I was implacable.

Meanwhile, the grand days and grand nights of a thrilling war washed over us. In the air we breathed there was an emotion that resembled love. As though the ocean were suddenly nearby, there was a tonic and an exultation in the blood. In those years, everything was different—even the taste of one's sleep. (I may never have been happy, but it is common knowledge that misery requires paradises lost.) There is no man who does not long for plenitude—the sum of the experiences of which a man is capable; there is no man who does not fear being defrauded of a part of that infinite inheritance. But my generation has had it all, for first it was given glory, and then defeat.